About Barbara Haber

Award-Winning Food Historian

Seen on Today, Martha Stewart Living and other TV programs and interviewed in such publications as Newsweek, the New York Times, and Bon Appetite, Barbara Haber has delighted thousands around the world with her fascinating stories of the special and often surprising ways that cooking and food have defined people's lives. In the 2005 Food Issue of the New Yorker, she was praised for having "invented the history of women and food".

For her many contributions to the study of food, she received a Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America Award from the James Beard Foundation and the prestigious M.F.K Fischer Award from Les Dame Des Escofier.

Author and Editor

Barbara Haber is the author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals, published by Simon and Schuster's Free Press and by Penguin in paperback. Praise for the book came from Julia Child, Gourmet Magazine, and other food notables as well as academic historians, and a chapter appeared in Best Food Writing 2002. Haber has also written on food topics for Harvard Magazine, Yankee Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Dictionary of American History, Notable American Women and many other popular and professional publications, including Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking and From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies, which she co-edited with Arlene Avakian.

Her earlier books include the respected study, Women in America: A Guide to Books, and American Women in the Twentieth Century, a distinguished ten-volume series published by Macmillan for which she served as General Editor.

Contributions to Food History at Harvard University and Cambridge and Oxford Presses

At the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, Haber served as Curator of Books and developed a major collection of over 16,000 volumes on cooking and food. To support the collection, she established the Radcliffe Culinary Friends and sponsored lectures and panel discussions by food-world notables. She also co-founded the Radcliffe Culinary Times and the Boston Culinary Historians, introduced First Mondays, a discussion group for local restaurateurs, and co-developed a landmark exhibition on food at Harvard's Widener Library that featured resources from Harvard and Radcliffe libraries and museums. To further promote the study of food, she served as senior advisory editor and contributed chapters on culinary history to the Cambridge World History of Food and the Encyclopedia of the History of American Food and Beverages, published by Oxford University Press.

Food Association Board Member, And PR Consultant to Food Companies and Associations

Barbara Haber currently serves on the awards board of the James Beard Foundation where she initiated and serves as curator for Beard on Books, a speaker series featuring notable food writers and cookbook authors. She is also on the board of Spoons Across America, a resource for children's culinary education. She earlier served on the governing board of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) and on the advisory board of the University of California Food and Culture series and its journal Gastronomica.

Haber has also been a consulting writer, speaker and advisor for public-relations agencies serving such organizations as Kraft Foods, McCormick, the Olive Oil Council, the Walnut Marketing Board, and the Chocolate Manufacturers of America, and for food-study groups seeking public funding.

Speaker on Food History and Food Writing

Barbara Haber has been a popular speaker on food topics on public and commercial radio and television, and for a wide variety of public-service and professional organizations. These include book clubs, libraries, volunteer groups, schools such as Wesleyan University and the University of Illinois, and health and nutrition organizations such as Oldways Preservation and Trust and the American Dietetics Association. She has also served on food-study panel discussions at IACP awards ceremonies in New York and Dallas, and at Gourmet Voice awards ceremonies in Cannes, as well as on food-writing panels at Boston University and Greenbrier conferences in Virginia.

Her speaking topics range from subjects in her book, including American women and the food they prepared during the Civil War, the opening of the West, the age of reform, and World War II and its aftermath, to the colorful people who have historically determined what we eat in this country-- food innovators and diet promoters and those who cooked to survive and succeeded as entrepreneurs and restaurateurs. What cookbooks tell us about ourselves and our past has also been the subject of many of Barbara Haber's most well-received talks.

Contact Information

About the Book

From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals surveys key events in American history by celebrating those who have prepared and served our country's food - to feed themselves and loved ones, improve our nation's health and well being, pursue careers in cooking, and help preserve their ancestral heritage.

Among the memorable Americans who appear in the book are:

• Asenath Nicholson, an eccentric New England widow who crossed Ireland largely on foot as a self-appointed missionary before the Irish Famine and then used her cooking skills to help save victims of the Great Hunger.
• Confederate and Union women volunteers like Phoebe Pember, a Jewish Southern belle, and young Northern writer Louisa May Alcott, who worked in "diet kitchens" in Civil War military hospitals to help save sick and wounded soldiers.
• Sylvester Graham, the father of American diet reform who preached sexual abstinence and vegetarianism in the early 19^th century and spawned successive generations of food crackpots, entrepreneurs and self-proclaimed nutritional experts, culminating in such modern weight-loss gurus as Dr. Atkins and celebrity diet cookbook writers like Elizabeth Taylor.
• Fred Harvey, who helped civilize the American west with good food served at his railroad hotels by respectable, well-groomed women known as the Harvey Girls.
• Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, a working-class housewife from Hyde Park, New York, who was appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt to manage the White House and was blamed for serving bad food during the dozen years of the FDR administration.
• Harvard faculty wives and Jewish refugees from Nazism who started the Window Shop, a popular Viennese restaurant and gift shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that served for years as a both a workplace and social service center for displaced people.
• American military nurses and civilian women who were captured in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor and learned the art of prison-camp cooking.
• African-American women in the American west, south and northeast who became successful cooks, cookbook writers and culinary historians, preserving the cuisine of their forbears and providing creative new innovations in food and restaurant service.

From Hardtack to Home Fries also explains the broad appeal of cookbooks and shows how many of them, like community cookbooks and cookbooks by well-known writers like Lillian Hellman and Marjory Kennan Rawlings, are as important to understanding American life as diaries and other traditional historical documents.

Praise from Julia Child and Others

"What a pleasure to have an illustrated peep into American history through the treasures of the Schlesinger Library's culinary collection. Barbara Haber, the library's distinguished culinary curator, gives us here a short tour through some of the fascinating insights that we would probably never have known about were it not for the cookbooks involved."

"Why was F.D. Rooseveltian food so notably bad, for instance? What about celebrity diets, Dr. Kellogg and his vegetarian and health legacy, and food reformists in general? There is the miserable life of the Irish immigrants and the veritable slave labor they performed. We see rare aspects of black history through its cooking, Jewish life through Jewish cooking. History becomes more meaningful when we can relate it to life, and food is indeed life."

Julia Child, TV cook and author of The French Chef Cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, From Julia's Kitchen and other popular cookbooks.

"There's nothing like a good book to make your commute fly by, and Barbara Haber's From Hardtack to Home Fries was so fascinating I actually found myself yearning for subway delays. The curator of books at Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, Haber uses food as a prism through which to view America: A White House cook so bland that guests were warned to eat before attending state dinners, POWs who fantasized about elaborate feasts, and an iron-willed nurse who used Jewish chicken soup to cure the wounds of the Civil War all appear in these pages.   Basing her research on old diaries and cookbooks, Haber makes a case for the primacy of food as a cultural influence that reaches far beyond the table."

Kemp Minifie, Gourmet, April 2002

"To anyone who has ever wondered whether food is anything more than the familiar tastes of home and memorable meals spent with friends and family, I can only say, READ THIS BOOK. I was moved, amused, uplifted, entertained, and instructed by Barbara Haber's fascinating look at American history through stories of the uses (and misuses) of food. Food is indeed a window on the culture and Barbara Haber's intriguing observations open an original way to understand women's roles in the public sphere. It is a rare pleasure to find a book as riveting and illuminating as this one."

Carol Field, author of In Nonna's Kitchen: Recipes and Traditions from Italy's Grandmothers

"Barbara Haber cooks up a delicious stew of stories that leaves you craving for more. Her culinary narratives, depicting a wide variety of actors over many eras, brilliantly reveal why food is so important to understanding this nation's cultural and social history."

Joyce Antler, Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University, and author of America and I: Short Stories by Jewish-American Writers and The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped America

From Hardtack to Home Fries

An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals

Contents

Excerpt: Home Cooking in the FDR White House: The Indomitable Mrs. Nesbitt

One of the unsolved mysteries of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era in Washington is the question of why the White House continually served bad food. A well-known axiom said to have circulated throughout the capitol during the twelve years of FDR's presidency advised all guests invited to a White House meal to eat first before leaving home.

The preparation of White House food was entrusted to one Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, a Hyde Park neighbor of the Roosevelts picked by Eleanor to be the general housekeeper at the Presidential residence. Mrs. Nesbitt's training for the job was limited, to say the least - the fifty-nine year old wife and grandmother had never before worked outside of her home. In Hyde Park she had established a local reputation as a good baker and had also volunteered with The League of Women voters. These two accomplishments, in Eleanor Roosevelt's eyes, qualified Nesbitt sufficiently to run the White House domestic staff.

Alas, Mrs. Nesbitt was in over her head. Open criticism of White House food became a favorite pastime among Washington insiders, a kind of in-joke that identified them as being close to the seat of American power.

Describing a disagreement over the inaugural luncheon menu celebrating Roosevelt's election to a third term, The New York Times reported that although the President was "powerful enough to 'override' the wishes of Congress on occasion, [he] had little influence with the White House housekeeper." Mrs. Nesbitt had foiled the wishes of the Chief Executive who had announced that chicken a la king would be served to the inaugural guests. Instead, they got chicken salad. Mrs. Nesbitt, fearing that a hot dish for 2,000 expected guests could not be kept hot, had made a unilateral decision to alter the menu, the rest of which included rolls without butter, coffee and unfrosted cake. In matters of food, Mrs. Nesbitt's parsimony was legendary.

According to a White House maid, Mrs. Nesbitt, upon being told that the President did not like broccoli, told the cook to fix it anyway, making it clear that she knew what was best. The President's exasperation with Nesbitt led him to tell his daughter Anna that one of his motivations for running for a fourth term was so that he could fire her. However, the running of the White House had long been ceded to Mrs. Roosevelt, who thought Mrs. Nesbitt was doing just fine.

From the memoir Nesbitt left behind, it's clear that what others regarded as ugly frugalities were part of a conscious effort to show that the First Family was willing to participate in the austerities required by the Depression and later by World War II. Nesbitt also pointed out that Mrs. Roosevelt made it a priority that she protect the President's health by providing him with simple dishes that included more vegetables and less butter than he might otherwise have wished.

Mrs. Nesbitt's stiff ways made her an easy mark but her loyalty to the First Lady was reciprocated and she stayed on. Perhaps, simply, because Mrs. Roosevelt was comfortable with her.

Recipe: Henrietta Nesbitt's Honey Drops